I am excited that Steven Chiang, a veteran of the video game industry who is strongly regarded for building high-quality games and scaling development teams and operations worldwide, has joined zynga.
Steve brings a unique combination of start-up entrepreneurship with @scale game management to his role as president of our game studios.
Steve helped invent the console gaming business and his deep expertise will
allow us to double down and deliver on the promise of social gaming.
A little about Steve.
Steve has 17 years of game experience, of which he spent the last 15 at Electronic Arts. At EA, he was most recently the senior vice president and group general manager for EA SPORTS where he oversaw the Madden NFL series, one of the all-time bestselling video game franchises in North America.
Under his tenure, EA SPORTS developed many of its most popular and highest
rated sports titles including NCAA Football, FIFA Soccer, NHL and NBA Live,
titles millions of people play daily. In the online space, Steve worked
with the teams to re-launch EASPORTS.com and create Tiger Woods PGA TOUR
Online.
Steve was a co-founder of Tiburon Entertainment which was acquired by EA in
1998. Steve tells us his family is addicted to FarmVille so he has extra
pressure to deliver great new gaming experiences. When will we see farmer's markets steve?
Starting today, we are bringing back offers around our games to provide our users who don’t have access to online payment methods the ability to make in-game purchases while having a compelling game experience. The offers are from eight companies -- Netflix, Discover Card, Blockbuster, HSBC Direct, Gamefly, Book of the Month Club, SnapFish and The New York Times – all of which have high Better Business Bureau ratings.
We have set up a team that is dedicated to checking the quality of any offer we display. This group reviews each offer and applies a strict set of standards for content and user experience before it can be displayed. We also have technology in place that will regularly check offers to verify that only Zynga reviewed offers are displayed. For more on our standards, visit http://www.zynga.com/contact/advertisingGuidelines.php .
Over time, we will phase in more companies as they meet our new standards.
Offers represent a valuable channel for advertisers, users and developers. They enable advertisers to sponsor a user's game session or item purchase in return for their attention, affiliation or purchase. For some users, this enables a purchase they could not have otherwise made or justified. For developers like us it represents incremental revenue to fund our games.
In addition, you will be seeing new brand engagement ads tested in our games. PetVille will test ads from Visa, Sprint, xBox, Timberland, MTV, TV Land, CW and HTC. This type of brand engagement will allow users to gain currency in a fast and easy way.
Looking forward, we hope to partner with the industry to develop standards and policies for advertising around social games and virtual goods to ensure that our users have meaningful game experiences from companies they can trust.
We would love to hear what's your top wishes for zynga games in 2010.
We know you want better reliability and availability of our games. We are actively working on this.
We know you want easier access to our customer support and faster response to your questions. We now have over 300 people working in cs and are developing our in house capabilities too.
What new features you would like in our games?
What new games would you like to play with friends?
What's your ultimate fantasy game?
How often do you play our games? How many of your friends play with you?
We would love to hear from you.
Best wishes to you and your friends and family for 2010 from the zynga family!
last week we mailed checks for around $550k to fatem.org and fonkoze.org. we were proud to see so many of our farmville players participate in this program which has raised over $700k to date.
following is more info on the programs zynga and farmville players are supporting. this was prepared and executed by my amazing sister, laura hartman, who is a professor of business ethics at depaul university in chicago and has also been acting director of zynga's non profit efforts.
Where our contribution will go and how it will be used
With
a population of just over ten million people, Haiti is the poorest
nation in the Western Hemisphere and the 7th poorest in the world.
Fifty-four percent of its people live on less than one dollar a day;
80% live on less than two dollars. Zynga's mission of connecting the
world through games is enhanced by our opportunity to support the
health and education of these children and their families.
Since
unemployment in Haiti is so high (estimated at 30-50%), micro-loans
such as those provided by one of our recipient organizations, Fonkoze, become critical to survival.
The above photos were taken by Professor Laura Hartman, Zynga's
Director of Social Strategy, during her recent visit in Haiti to our
recipient organizations. The women are borrowers who will benefit from
FarmVille farmers' and Zynga's contributions through a goat, a chicken
or a small loan; and, their children will have a more financially
stable family.
Most Haitians do not have adequate housing, nor proper sanitary
conditions. Migration to the major cities has compounded the urban
housing problem. Natural disasters, including cyclones, floods,
droughts, and earthquakes, have had serious effects on the housing
situation, as well. The photos below were taken during Prof. Hartman's
visit to these Fonkoze borrowers, as well.
FarmVille farmers'
and Zynga's contributions will assist the children and their families
be more effectively prepared for the housing challenges they face.
Less than half the country's school-age children attend primary school.
On the other hand, it takes only 5 years of schooling to become
reasonably literate; that is, to be able to read and understand basic
instructions and thereby become more effective within society. With the
help of FarmVille Farmers' and Zynga's contributions, Haiti can begin
to wipe out illiteracy. Below are photographs of some of the schools
supported by FATEM, one of Zynga's recipient organizations.
Additional Information about the Sweet Seeds for Change: Haiti Campaign
FATEM is a non-profit organization based in Mirebalais, Haiti, and
originally organized to bring information technology to the people in
the region, thus helping with the economic advancement of the area.
More recently, however, FATEM recognized the need for a sustainable
means by which to support the general education of Haitian children and
to ensure that these children have the necessary meals that will permit
their young bodies and brains to learn and grow.
FONKOZE, based in Port-au-Prince, is an alternative bank for the poor.
It is Haiti's largest micro-finance institution and is committed to the
economic and social improvement of the people and communities of Haiti
and to the reduction of poverty in the country.
michael arrington posted yesterday on mobile
offerings still being shown in our
new game fishville. I want to explain why this
occurred and how we are taking more aggressive steps to ensure this
never happens again.
zynga has not been able to
control the ad content as it is managed by the offer companies that we work with.
with regards to yesterday's incident, the offer provider, doubleding, told us this was the result of their failure to remove an optimization queue which was still showing these ads to 10% of pageviews. i want to be clear that zynga had no control over the pages being shown and never filtered them from michael or anyone's view.
we recognize it
is our responsibility to ensure that offers which generate a bad user
experience are not shown with any of our games.
therefore, we
are removing all CPA offers across zynga games until we can control
their
inclusion and presentation ourselves. This will be effective by end of
day today. this move is worth it for the
long-term user experience and value to our partners like facebook and
myspace.
yesterday’s
mobile offer issue was particularly painful as we had helped fund doubleding earlier this year in the hopes of cleaning up the space and raising the bar on
user experience. we intend to influence them and others to improve
their ad content and be long-term
focused for the success of the social gaming and social networking
industries.
as I
said in my post last monday, my mission is to build
zynga
into a sustainable consumer service with enduring value to our users.
we will continue to do whatever it takes to earn our users trust and
respect for the long-term.
michael arrington posted a clip today
of a bar-side chat I did with Berkeley entrepreneurs in which I stressed how we
were laser focused from the beginning on finding revenue opportunities that
would scale. The primary reason I pointed to is that entrepreneurs should push
to control their own destinies, and being profitable was the best path.
In the video I refer to how early on
we experimented with offering zwinky toolbars. Unfortunately, we offered
these before trying them out for ourselves. Once we did, we found them to be
a painful experience and i'm proud that even then as a
10 person startup we decided to take them down.
the lesson we learned was that while we needed
to strive for early profitability, we also couldn't sacrifice user experience.
Btw, these zwinky toolbars from an
IAC subsidiary are still widely offered on the web today.
Michael Arrington posted over the weekend about CPA offers within
social games and questioned why facebook, myspace, zynga and others would expose
these to our users. He raises good points about ‘scammy’ advertisers and the
bad user experience they create. I agree with him and others that some of these
offers misrepresent and hurt our industry.
It has been my mission at zynga to create a sustainable
consumer service with long term value to our users and partners. Social gaming is emerging quickly and requiring
new rules of engagement from host networks to user payments and
advertising forms.
So why does zynga offer these ads?
Most of these offers are good for the
advertiser and user. There are many users who don’t have access to online payment
methods who are still interested in making in game purchases. There is also
great potential for large web players like amzn, ebay and netflix to leverage
social media channels like facebook and zynga to acquire new user
relationships. Sponsoring a white tiger or pink tractor may accelerate these customer acquisition campaigns.
The offer industry is still just getting started and this category
of advertising makes up a small minority of our revenue, the bulk of which comes
from users directly purchasing virtual goods.
We have worked hard to police and remove bad offers. In fact,
the worst offender, tatto media, referenced in the techcrunch article, had already been taken down and permanently banned prior
to the post. Nevertheless, we need to be more aggressive
and have revised our service level agreements with these providers requiring
them to filter and police offers prior to posting on their networks. We have
also removed all mobile ads until we see any that offer clear user value.
At zynga, we have faced a similar challenge in providing customer support to millions of users of our free games. Six months ago we were
overwhelmed with our ticket volumes and faced an F rating with the better
business bureau. We made massive efforts to address this, getting our maximum
response times for live email and phone support down to 72 hours and raised our
rating to a B+. Even today we realize our customer support isn’t at the level
our users expect and we continue to work on it.
Similarly, we are working to improve the quality of the CPA offers
exposed to our users and evolving our policies and practices to ensure that
zynga is worthy of our users’ trust.
There is no doubt that social gaming is entering the
mainstream culture and there is a business to be created around fun. It's particularly
exciting to see how social games can empower people to change their world. In a small way, we have seen this with our
sweet seeds for Haiti campaign where Farmville players raised $500k to provide
lunches for 500 kids for the next year. We expect to do more.
As we evolve to a world where people connections are the
basis for the largest consumer services, we will face more challenges. I’m
confident that with so many smart people (and critics) we will overcome these.
we are sorry that our games were down for the last 2 hrs. our netops crew is working hard to bring our games back up. mafia wars is up now on fb and rest coming in next few minutes.
we're really sorry your evening fun was interrupted.
kevin rose of diggnation covers your game! well, he actually said he lost geek cred by even mentioning, but check out minute 35ish and on where he covers farmville...
this has become a big topic in the past week with fred's post and now a techcrunch story. also, thx to adeo ressi for all his great work with the funded and the entrepreneur foundation to help spur more amazing startups.
this is a comment i posted in response to fred wilson's great post about converging on a common term sheet for first round venture financing of startups.
i will add a few points.
1. pre money valuation should value the company as it exists today. if investors want to ask for an option pool that is reducing the value of the company as it exists today and is therefore a lower pre money. i've always thought this was a bs way for vc's to sell you an emotional value but make you take a third less.
2. if a company is profitable the entrepreneur should NEVER give up control. if it's not, the vc's can negotiate for that. control is hire/fire the ceo and set budgets.
3. msg to vc's. if you like an industry, company, team back them. if you dont dont. entrepreneurs - dont work with vc's that demand anything beyond normal preferred with 1x liquidation. if they ask for 8% dividends and a 5 yr forced payback, tell them to go be bankers and lend their money out.
4. control - entrepreneurs, assume that if a vc can fire you they will. it can happen bc you performed badly and also bc you performed too well, and you have never managed such a big business.
5. relationships - matter a lot. go with people you know and trust, not the highest bidder. go 10% below your market price, choose your investor and hopefully they will feel priviledged. my advice is pick people you would like to have beer and sushi with like fred.
6. ref check - ask to interview founders of failed companies the vc backed, especially ones who have been replaced. remember, some should be replaced.
Fyi, facebook is experiencing network outages which have taken all our games down intermittently all morning. Sorry to anyone missing their morning fix.
Its been painful to watch our democrat led govt turn into a free money feeding frenzy.
Todays nytimes reports that in order to pass the climate change bill lawmakers doled out billions in gifts to each other and special interests from agriculture, forestry and even oil.
It says "the deal making continued up untill the final moments with rep waxman doling out billions on the house floor to secure final votes.'
The story notes that a freshman lawmaker from florida got $50 million for a hurricane research center.
Rep bobby rush of illinois withheld support until a last minute deal got his state $1 billion for jobs and energy efficient public housing. Does anyone question whether the energy saved will equal the $1 billion we're providing?
Even texas oil refineries got 'relief' with nearly $3 billion annually to help with added costs.
Rahm emanuel's quote says the president 'loves the bill...including the great, the good and the not so great provisions.'
As I've said before, we are reliving the lyndon johnson years of guns and butter. The only difference is the magnitude of spending.
What happens when you have a country with less than half its voters paying any taxes and a small % paying the majority?
For the minority footing greater bills there is a disincentive to generate income. For the vast majority there is a race to the bottom. Get while the getting's good.
In other nytimes news...the governor of south carolina says he will repay public funds used to visit his mistress in argentina which he rationalizes because 'it was a real love story'. And Al franken wins the supreme court decision giving the dems a filibuster proof senate majority.
I'm happy to report that zynga is now handling all cs tix within 72 hrs. Our team has worked hard to keep up with the growth in our game userbase. Zynga now has nearly 200 cs reps across 3 continents responding to our customers.
If you have an outstanding issue that remains unresolved pls resubmit to our cs.
The govt running gm is like wolves tending the sheep herd. Great npr piece on all the ways congressmen are interfering with gm mgt's efforts to reduce costs.
Zynga has recently banned many players across its games for bad actions like chip hacking and selling.
If you believe you have been unfairly banned pls email chris hinton, chrish@zynga.com with a link to your profile. Zynga will verify your account and reinstate if deserved.
All web services will eventually look and feel like games. Users will gravitate to the 'funnest' ecommerce or other sites. Game mex will be the most valuable skillset for web content and commerce.
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